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Australia's level of kindness related to one's own kind

John Elder

We are a nation that donates $17 million to help our sick children via a television appeal but locks up newly arrived youngsters from trauma-torn countries. We love to read about the plight of the former but not the latter in the media. So how do we rate ourselves in terms of kindness?

This paradox is perhaps reflected in new research that found our young people (born since 1986) commit more acts of kindness to strangers than older generations, and yet they believe Australia overall is not an especially kind place.

The research was commissioned by the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania as part of the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes conducted annually by the Australian National University.

The kindness study, believed to be the first in the world, asked more than 2000 people how important it is to be kind; did they think most Australians are kind; is everyone deserving of kindness; and how frequently did they engage in acts of kindness.

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Sociologist Dr Nicholas Hookway said the study was undertaken in part to "put empirical meat on the argument that we are living in an age of moral decline because of the reported weakening community, religion and traditional authorities."

Since the 1970s, social theorists have debated moral decline brought on by skyrocketing divorce rates, the rise of personal development and self-centricity and excessive consumerism.

Despite this school of thought being decades old, it is the younger generation that stands charged with narcissism and failure to build relationships of substance.

"And while the difference between generations was one of our standout findings, the key finding was that younger generations report being kinder than older generations, notably to strangers," Dr Hookway said. "We found iGens [those born since 1986] are six times more likely to perform an act of kindness than baby boomers."

But they are less likely to think most Australians are kind and, in a separate analysis, only 11 per cent of iGens agree it is important to be kind to neighbours, compared with 58 per cent of Baby Boomers.

Dr Hookway said the paradox in these results might be explained by "young people seeing the world as a more brutal place; they're feeling most acutely wider social transformations. Work and relationships have become brutally short-term, and the world at large is intensely competitive. Whereas if you're older, it's easier to say 'business as usual' than to take moral responsibility for the state of things."

Tasmania University's Associate Professor Daphne Habibis said that while one-third of Australians felt some people were less deserving of kindness (criminals, bludgers, asylum seekers), "Australians are overwhelmingly committed to kindness as a moral value and that assumptions that we are becoming an unkind society are unfounded".

She said most Australians were not motivated by external sources of kindness such as religion or community expectation, but by internal ones such as feelings of authenticity. This suggested that even in a world where there was no external reference point for moral behaviour, people would still be committed to caring for one another. All of which ran counter to the argument that we are in a state of moral decline.

Dr Habibis and Dr Hookway are hoping to pursue their kindness research via a series of focus groups that will yield deeper qualitative analysis. Dr Habibis, who is director of the university's Housing and Community Research Unit, said the question of who deserves kindness in our society "has implications for expectations of which social groups the state will target for support and how much it should spend on helping them".